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The most alarming aspect of the American political climate today is a failure of empathy.

by KAREN INOUYE

Khizr and Ghazala Khan at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Public domain via Wikipedia.

Of the many alarming aspects of the current American political climate, perhaps the most striking is the frequency with which politicians, political commentators, and the electorate have taken recourse to emotional abstraction. This may seem an odd assertion, given the more obvious invigoration of the alt-right, the continuing financial pollution of representative government, and the ferociousness of debates about race, faith, and belonging in American society.

Much has been said about the perversion of history that allows some to suggest that this country should implement blanket exclusions, large-scale deportation, or even mass imprisonment based on geographical origin or religious affiliation. As many people have noted, such views warp the shameful history of this country’s behavior toward marginal groups. Among other things, those views obliviate or even deny outright the Constitutional, economic, and political damage done by Executive Order 9066, which saw over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry forced from the West Coast and relocated to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself called concentration camps.

Much has been said about the perversion of history that allows some to suggest that this country should implement blanket exclusions based on geographical origin or religious affiliation.

Criticisms of this sort are entirely valid, but they raise another question: What allows such sentiment to reach critical mass? This is an easy question to miss, particularly when the election cycle asks us to identify our political hopes, fears, dreams, and resentments with one or another person, rather than with the people and policies associated with that person. The risk in this is that we will ignore the engine of that person’s candidacy. And to ignore that engine is to ignore a vital, if elusive, part of what allows reactionary sentiment to gain purchase in the first place: emotional abstraction, which is in truth a failure of empathy.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the emergence of Dada, City Lights Booksellers in conjunction with other local and international partners, celebrates Dadaism this week and next at the Dada World Fair in San Francisco, bringing together artists, thinkers, and ideas the world-over. In what follows, author Maria Stavrianki offers her thoughts on the occasion.

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Is it legitimate to celebrate the centenary of Dada? Doesn’t the commemoration of a founding fundamentally contradict the spirit and the practices of the movement, which, despite its intrinsic heterogeneity, was characterized in all its variants by its struggle against the reification of time and history? Rather than a movement, moreover, Dada was a constellation, shaped in different places and at different moments by fundamentally different individuals.

This is what so radically distinguished Dada from other avant-garde movements, which took on organicist or more rigorously organized and in any case more hierarchical forms. It was the name “Dada” that ultimately gave phonetic unity to a historical manifestation that was difficult to contain as a stable form. “Da,” a phoneme of infinite and infantile plasticity, brought calcified language back to its first indeterminate articulations.

How the Qur'an heralded a quest for knowledge and rational inquiry in Arabia.

by SARI NUSSEIBEH

Public domain.

By any measure, the changes that gripped Arabia and its surroundings in the seventh century CE are extraordinary. The major players of the day—the Roman, Byzantine, and Sassanid Empires—set the course of history on a broad scale. Yet within a few decades an Arab world, previously regarded as a culturally insignificant backwater, catapulted to center stage.

Besides constituting a major political power in its own right, the Arab world emerged as an intellectual powerhouse that energized a new phase in the history of civilization. A desert people—hardly in possession of a script for their language (much less adequate material for making use of such writing)—brought forth, as if by magic, scholars and intellectual giants who made invaluable contributions to intellectual history. A marginal language spoken by a marginal people transformed into a language of power—a medium bearing the most advanced scientific thought. How did this transformation occur? What sparked this intellectual revolution, the birth of reason, which ultimately produced some of the greatest minds in the history of thought and science?

Jewish economic history—too long stigmatized—opens up surprising insights into the past, and the present too.

by ADAM TELLER

Gold medal coins with the bust of Bogusław Radziwiłł.

When I began the research that would eventually lead to the publication of Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania—a study of the Jews’ economic past in eastern Europe—I felt as if I was swimming against the tide in the study of Jewish history. The field I was working in, Jewish economic history, had been in the doldrums since the mid-twentieth century. The use of economic motifs in the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda that led up to the Holocaust had made it a topic that many felt too hot to handle. Moreover, the rise in popularity of first social and then cultural history had opened new vistas in understanding the complexities of Jewish non-Jewish interaction in the Diaspora that seemed to render insignificant issues of the Jews’ economic life.

I was convinced that this was not the case. I believed (and still do) that the study of Jewish economic life is a key field through which to examine the relations which developed between Jews and surrounding societies. This is because an integral aspect of most economic activity is that it engages the individual in a broad network of relationships and interests. The line stretching from owner of the means of production to producer, and from there to distributor (and those servicing the market), and thence to consumer, is often a very long one. It crosses and re-crosses seemingly impenetrable social barriers of class, ethnicity, religion, and gender (not to mention physical segregation where that exists), connecting those it touches in the most natural way. The study of Jewish economic history is therefore a means of understanding one of the most important mechanisms of social integration that functioned wherever Jews lived—even in societies where their integration was frowned upon.

The study of Jewish economic life is a key field through which to examine the relations which developed between Jews and surrounding societies.

A 1910 postcard from Salonica featuring a Jewish man and women in traditional Jewish clothing.

The dynamic port city of Salonica, once home to the Young Turk movement that overthrew the Ottoman sultan in 1909 and the city over which the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Ottomans fought during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, is today a largely forgotten corner of the former Ottoman Empire and the second city of contemporary Greece. Salonica and her Jews—who remarkably numbered half of the city’s diverse inhabitants a century ago—once played key roles in the region’s culture, politics, and commerce. But the historic significance of the city in modern times—and particularly that of its Jewish residents—has largely been excised from academic and popular consciousness, a veritable “orphan of history,” as one scholar put it.

The historic significance of Salonica in modern times—and particularly that of its Jewish residents—has largely been excised from academic and popular consciousness.

The city’s invisibility to the outside world runs counter to my own upbringing, which was filled with stories from my Salonican-born relatives, all centering around this vibrant place and its people. Enchanting tales were told of my great grandfather, a rabbi and kabbalist, walking down the streets of Salonica side by side with a priest and an imam, or composing protective amulets for farmers who repaid him with live poultry and fresh produce; or my grandfather and his brother riding their prized possession—a bicycle—along the sea with the White Tower in the distance; or my great uncle and his wife and their children remaining in the city and “disappearing” during World War II. But how exactly did they disappear? Just as importantly, how had they lived? I wanted to access this lost world of Jewish Salonica—both to understand the world from which my family came and to restore a voice to the city and its Jewish community.

This summer the Rossini Opera Festival—dedicated to producing the works of composer Gioachino Rossini and located in the composer’s hometown of Pesaro on the Adriatic Sea—presented the comedy Il turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy), first performed in 1814 but nowadays rarely staged. In the Europe of 2016, deeply polarized over Middle Eastern Muslim refugees and the longstanding presence of Muslim immigrants, this light-hearted comic opera hits some very provocative notes: it tells the tale of a traveling Turk, the vocally glamorous, irresistibly seductive Prince Selim, who comes to Italy, as if on vacation. It’s an opera that, even as it entertains us, compels us to reflect seriously about the nature of our current cultural conflict and the very different sorts of imagined encounters that have formed a part of Western culture.

Under the influence of the Enlightenment Turks became figures of interest with whom Europeans could ultimately identify.

Operas about Turks were actually a staple of the performance repertory throughout the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century, when Rossini became the last important composer to feature singing Turks in his operas. Under the influence of the European Enlightenment Turks became figures of interest with whom Europeans could ultimately identify; they could recognize in Turkish scenarios their own political ambivalences (concerning absolute government), their own social anxieties (about the hierarachy of the sexes), and could even explore a European sense of self as mirrored in the figure of the singing Turk.

Though the end of World War II may seem part of the distant past (Japan formally surrendered seventy-one years ago today) the cultural and political legacy of that conflict still looms large over the international stage, particularly in Asia. President Barack Obama’s visit this past May to Hiroshima did more than pay homage to the victims of the atomic bombing carried out by the United States more than seven decades ago. The President also stepped into the complex and often treacherous realm of wartime historical memory.

Memories of wartime events among the combatants of the war are fractured and contested.

Memories of wartime events among the combatants of the war are fractured and contested—Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Americans have formed almost distinct narratives of the war and its meaning. And even within those societies, there are rivaling accounts and understandings of the past. These divergent memories explain why wartime history issues remain a catalyst for conflict in the region, where political leaders use this history to mobilize nationalist feelings.

In The Order of Things, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, Michel Foucault describes the birth around the turn of the nineteenth century of two new epistemological or linguistic forms, forms, he suggests, that his contemporaries have taken for granted. The first of these, which pervades all of the soft sciences, is history, here the name not only for the awareness that events and our experience of events occur in time but also for the peculiarly modern belief that a thing’s most fundamental truth can be revealed through an interrogation of the temporal processes by which it came to be. The second is literature, now in the emphatic sense of the term as it unfolds from Hölderlin to Mallarmé, Roussel, and Beckett, a mode of language concerned not with adequation to reality but with its own intransitive existence: “a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being.”

Foucault wants to show how we’ve moved away from an earlier moment guided by the rationalist ideal of clear and distinct ideas.

History and literature, then: two uniquely modern forms. Although expressed in the sometimes oracular language typical of his milieu, Foucault’s claim about the roughly coincident birth of these forms is not, I think, especially controversial. History was indeed “born” in the nineteenth century, not only in the grand sense that Foucault intends but also in the more prosaic sense that it was codified as a discipline almost simultaneously at the University of Berlin (1810) and the Sorbonne (1812), and very much in the wake of the French Revolution. And it was certainly present to the consciousness of the age. Literary critic and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, for example, could write in 1798 to his brother August that “I am disgusted by any theory that is not historical”; half a century later, Flaubert would write to the Goncourt brothers that “the historical sense dates from yesterday. And it is perhaps the best thing about the nineteenth century”; and Nietzsche’s warning in the second essay of the Untimely Meditations that “there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which injures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people, or a culture” would hardly have seemed as urgent a century earlier.

Being a historian does not preclude one from talking about one’s family, but it does offer the use of a unique vocabulary to describe it: the language of the social sciences. My attempt at a family biography is both a private and public reflection about the fate of my family and I speak about them not as if theirs was a unique, remarkable destiny, but rather as one that traversed, and was perhaps determined, by broader social forces.

If their life was short and tragic, it is because they were manipulated by one totalitarianism and destroyed by another, under the indifferent gaze of democracies.

My father's parents were born in Poland in the early 20th century. As officials in the local Communist Party, which was illegal at the time, they were sentenced to five years in prison. On their release, they migrated to France, without a visa, and settled in Paris in the late 1930s. A few years later, they were arrested and deported to Auschwitz where they were murdered. To summarize, we can say that they spent their entire lives in hiding: first in Poland, as communists; then in France, as illegal immigrants; and finally, under the Vichy regime, as Jews. Three clandestine lives, three absences from the world, until the ultimate one: their annihilation in the context of genocide. If their life was short and tragic, it is because they were manipulated by one totalitarianism and destroyed by another, under the indifferent gaze of democracies.

My book, A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, is a reflection on the fate of my family, but it is also an essay on the writing of history. Three methodological issues are close to my heart: the use of the "I"; the need for distance and reflexivity; and the relationship between history and memory.

What mysterious deaths and memory struggles in Chile can teach the U.S.

by ADAM ROSENBLATT

Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, recording his poetry for the Library of Congress in 1966 (public domain). New evidence may indicate that the poet did not die of natural causes.

The week after I took my children trick-or-treating on the streets of our Philadelphia suburb turned out to be a time of ghosts in another place where I once lived: Chile. On November 5, Chile’s Interior Ministry released a public statement calling it “highly probable” that Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, died of poisoning soon after the coup that ushered in Augusto Pinochet’s 27-year dictatorship, and not from the natural progression of the prostate cancer for which he was being treated at the time. If true, this would confirm years of suspicion that Neruda, like the singer Victor Jara and thousands of other Chileans, was a victim of Pinochet’s violent efforts to suppress political dissent.

Chile’s Interior Ministry released a public statement calling it “highly probable” that Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, died of poisoning.

The retelling of Neruda’s death began when the poet’s former driver stepped forward in 2011 to allege that after treatment in Santiago’s Santa María clinic for his cancer, and only hours before his death, Neruda confided that he had been given a strange injection in his stomach. The path to an official investigation—which would result in the exhumation of Neruda’s corpse from his seaside grave and posthumous travel to four different forensic laboratories in as many countries—has been contentious.

Despite the Chilean government’s bold declaration, the tests thus far don’t offer conclusive evidence. The Staphylococcus aureus bacteria found in his body has no relation to cancer, but this does not conclusively prove that Neruda died from poisoning. Further tests are still needed to clarify the origins of such a potentially lethal microorganism (healthy individuals can be perfectly asymptomatic carriers of the bug), and even then we may never know for certain. For those inclined to think Neruda died of cancer—possibly accelerated by grief at seeing his country fall into the hands of a brutal dictator—and those who believe he must have been poisoned, there is no reason yet to significantly alter their version of history.

How the 1956 massacre has shaped the Palestinian struggle for civil rights.

by TAMIR SOREK

Memorial on the mosque of Kafr Qasim marking the October 29, 1956 massacre. Public domain.

Kafr Qasim is an Arab village in territory that was annexed by Israel following the 1949 Israeli-Jordanian armistice agreement, and was under strict military rule until 1966. Fifty-nine years ago today, on October 29th, 1956, a group of peasants from Kafr Qasim returned to the village from their fields, unaware that their village was under curfew. Forty-seven of them were executed by the Israeli Border Patrol troops, in a massacre that would become a formative political myth for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. For the next two decades the anniversary of the massacre would be the most important date on their political calendar.

What shaped the memory of the Kafr Qasim massacre as an exceptional case was the political status of the victims as Israeli citizens.

The emergence of Kafr Qasim as a major political myth is not as self-evident as it appears to be, because during the same years Israel killed thousands of other Palestinians whose deaths remained outside of the canonic political memory. What shaped the memory of the Kafr Qasim massacre as an exceptional case was the political status of the victims as Israeli citizens.

In 1956 the Green Line was still in the process of becoming a socio-political border and the choice of Arab leaders in Israel to turn the event into a formative, watershed moment in the state’s political development reflected an emerging outlook, according to which it is possible to turn the nominal citizenship of the Palestinians in Israel into a tangible set of civil rights. It was exactly because the massacre in Kafr Qasim undermined this outlook by targeting Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, that it became necessary to make it a symbol of civil struggle. Paradoxically, the massacre became a milestone in the construction of Israeli civic consciousness among the Palestinians in Israel.

Venerating Gandhi as the arbiter of anticolonial struggle obscures the history of Africans.

by ASHWIN DESAI & GOOLAM VAHED

Gandhi (center left) with the volunteers of the 2nd Indian Stretcher Bearer Corps during the Zulu uprising, in 1906 in South Africa. Public domain.

The past decade has yielded a number of works by Indian authors on the South African Gandhi—the Gandhi who spent twenty-one formative years living and working in the racially riven country that was home to native Africans, Hindu and Muslim, indentured and trader class Indians, Dutch settlers, and British colonizers. What stands out in some of these works is the persistent attempt to portray Gandhi’s relationship with Africans as one of cooperation and collaboration toward a common political goal, a goal born from shared aspirations for social and political equality. This narrative, however, obscures particular nuances about Gandhi’s early political project, sanitizing aspects of his biography and—by dint of placing Gandhi at the forefront of struggles against white minority rule—virtually erasing Africans from this history.

By emphasizing the seminal role of Gandhi and the vanguard role of Indians in the South African liberation struggle, history ends up serving a racist narrative.

Following on from earlier works by Anil Nauriya, Rajmohan Gandhi, and an edited collection by Shanti Sadiq Ali, Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India perpetuates this narrative; though a comprehensive study, it underscores how the story of the South African Gandhi remains—ironically—incomplete. For Guha, it is on African soil that Gandhi honed his sense of empathy, anti-racism, anti-colonialism and quest for equality, a view that has garnered enough social currency to make Gandhi as much a celebrated figure in South African history, as in Indian history. In the Prologue, Guha holds that “because they [Indians] were better educated and better organized [than Africans], some Indians could more actively challenge the facts of white domination.” In one bold sweep, the century-long resistance of Africans to the colonial wars of dispossession is written out of history.

After receiving calls from her neighbors, a woman found that her daughter’s picture had been used in an ad for a local ice cream store, without the daughter’s or the mother’s consent. Her daughter had simply “liked” the ice cream store on Facebook. The woman was outraged and embarrassed. People across the country whose photographs had been similarly exploited under Facebook’s Sponsored Stories advertising program sued Facebook.

In the past hundred years, in increasing numbers, Americans have turned to the law to help them defend and control their public images.

In 1948, the Saturday Evening Post ran a critique of cabdrivers in Washington, D.C., that accused them of cheating their customers. A photograph appeared with the article that depicted a woman cabdriver, Muriel Peay, talking to the article’s author on the street. The caption did not name her, and the article did not refer to her. Although the woman had consented to be photographed, she did not know that the picture would be used in an article on cheating cabbies. She was humiliated, and she sued the magazine.

In the early 1940s, Zelma Cason, who was the inspiration for a character in a book by a famous writer, sued the author. The portrayal of Cason was highly complimentary, although in one part of the book the author described her as an “ageless spinster resembling an angry and efficient canary” and noted that she used profanity. Cason was upset, and she sought damages of one hundred thousand dollars.

Angry and insulted, these people could have done any number of things. On seeing her picture in the Saturday Evening Post, Muriel Peay could have gone home and cried. Perhaps she did. The unwilling subjects of the Sponsored Stories program could have boycotted Facebook—perhaps they did, too. But these individuals also chose to sue. In the past hundred years, in increasing numbers, Americans have turned to the law to help them defend and control their public images. The twentieth century saw the creation of a law of public image, and the phenomenon of personal image litigation.

From Japan, to Cuba, to Iran—three snapshots of a world changed by nuclear weapons.

Atomic cloud over Nagasaki, August 9th, 1945. Public domain image.

William J. Perry, who served as Secretary of Defense during President Bill Clinton’s administration, is regarded as one of the five “Cold Warriors”—along with Henry Kissinger, George P. Schultz, Sam Nunn, and Sid Drell—who, together, have formed an influential group whose activism has profoundly impacted nuclear security. From his role in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, to his stint as Defense Secretary, to his more recent involvement in Track 2 talks facilitating the recent Iran deal, minimizing the nuclear threat—introduced to the world stage 70 years ago today—has been one of Perry’s chief preoccupations. The following post was adapted from his forthcoming memoir, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink.

I.

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

—Albert Einstein; 23 May 1946

My journey at the nuclear brink began well before the Cuban Missile Crisis, on an infamous Sunday in 1941, four years before the first atomic bomb was dropped. These were the first stirrings that would lead me to a life encompassing military service, development of Cold War reconnaissance systems, government service, university teaching, and diplomacy—much of it focused on the goal of reducing the nuclear threat.

With contemporaries like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, it is little wonder that the name of poet Robinson Jeffers rings far fewer bells, even in the ears of avid poetry fans. Jeffers, who was born at the twilight of the 19th century and wrote most prolifically throughout the first half of the 20th, joined an audaciously talented chorus of American poets who—then, as now—were regarded as literary celebrities and cultural icons.

Jeffers is essential to understanding ourselves, the twentieth century, and the world.

But, on April 4th, 1932 the portrait of a reclusive California-based poet named Robinson Jeffers, photographed in contemplative profile, was emblazoned on the cover of Time magazine, nine years after Amy Lowell received a similar honor, and eighteen years before T.S. Eliot would adorn its pages. With the publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924, Jeffers’ fame sprung into being virtually overnight. One decade and multiple collections of poetry later, he had become arguably the most famous poet in the United States.

Despite his prominence and critical success—and the numerous literary honors he accrued notwithstanding—one poet and literary critic writing in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune asked, “Why does so much deep silence surround the name of Robinson Jeffers?”

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